And here’s 50, a month after the game officially launched. Of course, my progress was slowed a lot by the fact that Bioware’s preferred downtime is usually smack bang in the Australian evening, i.e. prime playing time for us Antipodeans. Still, it could be worse: every SOE game I’ve played had daily maintenance, usually an hour a day at 9pm my time.

Siha’s progress to 50 was further slowed by my resolve to smell every flower I could find. I wasn’t deliberately avoiding levelling – and in fact I found soloing in SWTOR much more fun than in any previous MMO – but after six straight years of WoW and a fair bit of endgame burnout, I was in no hurry to race to Operations. It seems many of my guildies felt the same way – I’m only the eighth to hit 50. Now I’m looking forward to seeing what the SWTOR endgame offers, going back and polishing off all the bonus quest serieses (which I skipped at the time, except Tatooine’s), and wallowing around in a whole slew of alts.

My total /played wouldn’t be terribly reflective of the actual time I took, as there were several days where I wasn’t playing, but I was logged in keeping slicing missions ticking over. Though I suppose that counts as playing, so I’ll check next time I’m on Siha. :)